Daniil Ivanovich Kharms, real name Yuvachev, was born on December 30 (December 17 according to the old style), 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father was a naval officer. In 1883, for complicity in the People's Will terror, he was brought to trial, spent four years in solitary confinement and more than ten years in hard labor, where he experienced a religious conversion: along with the memoirs Eight Years on Sakhalin (1901) and Shlisselburg Fortress (1907) he published mystical treatises "Between the World and the Monastery" (1903), "Secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven" (1910).

Kharms's mother was of noble origin, in the 1900s she was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg.

After the revolution, she became a housekeeper at the Barachnaya Hospital named after S.P. Botkin, his father worked as a senior auditor of the State Savings Banks, and later as head of the accounting department of the working committee at the construction of the Volkhovskaya hydroelectric power station.

In 1915-1918, Daniel studied at the privileged Main German School of St. Peter in Petrograd (Petrishul).

In 1922-1924 - at the 2nd Detskoselskaya unified labor school, the former gymnasium in Tsarskoye Selo, where his aunt Natalya Kolyubakina was the director and teacher of Russian literature.

In 1924-1926 he studied at the First Leningrad Electrotechnical School, from where he was expelled for "weak attendance and inactivity in public works."

In the early 1920s, Daniil Yuvachev chose the pseudonym "Kharms" for himself, which gradually "attached" to him so much that it became part of the family name.

In the 1930s, when all Soviet citizens were given passports, he added the second part to his last name through a hyphen, so it turned out "Yuvachev-Kharms".

The pseudonym "Kharms" is interpreted by researchers as "charm", "charm" (from the French charm), as "harm" and "unhappiness" (from the English harm) and as a "sorcerer". In addition to the main pseudonym, Daniil used about 30 more pseudonyms - Charms, Harmonius, Shardam, Dandan, as well as Ivan Toporyshkin, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling and others.

He began to write poetry while studying at school, later he chose poetry as his main profession.

The earliest surviving poem by Kharms, "In July, somehow our summer ..." refers to 1922.

The early Kharms was greatly influenced by the poet Alexander Tufanov, the successor of Velimir Khlebnikov, the author of the book "To Zaumi", who founded the Order of Zaumnikov in March 1925, the core of which included Kharms himself, who took the title "Look Zaumi".

The departure from Tufanov was predetermined by friendship with the poet Alexander Vvedensky, with whom in 1926 Harms created the "School of plane trees" - a chamber community, which, in addition to two poets, included the philosophers Yakov Druskin, Leonid Lipavsky and the poet, later editor of the children's magazine "Hedgehog" Nikolai Oleinikov. The main form of activity of the "plane trees" was performances with the reading of their poems.

In 1926, Kharms's poem "The Incident on the Railway" was published in a collection of poems, in 1927 "Peter Yashkin's Verse" was published in the collection "Bonfire".

In 1928, Kharms became a member of the literary group of the Association of Real Art (OBERIU), which included the poets Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky and others, who used the techniques of alogism, absurdity, and the grotesque. At the evening "Three Left Hours" organized by the association, the highlight of the program was the staging of Kharms's play "Elizaveta Bam".

In the same year, the writer Samuil Marshak attracted Kharms to work in the Leningrad department of the Detgiz children's literature publishing house. The press published "Ivan Ivanovich Samovar" (1928), "Ivan Toporyshkin" (1928), "How Dad Shot My Ferret" (1929), "Merry Siskins" (co-authored with Marshak, 1929), "Million "(1930)," Liar "(1930) and others. Kharms' poems were published in 11 separate editions.

In December 1931, Kharms, along with other employees of the Leningrad children's sector of the publishing house, was arrested on suspicion of anti-Soviet activities, was sentenced to three years' imprisonment, which was replaced in 1932 by exile to Kursk, where he was escorted along with Vvedensky. In 1932, he managed to return to Leningrad, where he continued to collaborate in the magazines "Hedgehog" and "Chizh", published a free translation of the story of the German poet Wilhelm Bush "Plikh and Plyukh".

In 1934 Kharms was admitted to the Writers' Union of the USSR. In the same year, he began work on the philosophical treatise "Existence", which was not completed.

In March 1937, the magazine "Chizh" published the poem "A Man Came Out of the House", which tells how a man left his house in the USSR and disappeared without a trace. After that, Kharms was no longer printed in children's publications. In the same year, he began to create the prose cycle "Cases".

In late May - early June 1939, Kharms wrote the story "The Old Woman", which many researchers consider the main thing in the writer's work.

In the fall of 1939, Kharms feigned a mental illness, in September-October he was in the neuro-psychiatric dispensary of the Vasileostrovsky district, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In the summer of 1940 he wrote the stories "Knights", "Mishin's Victory", "Lecture", "Pashkvil", "Interference", "Fall", in September - the story "Power", later - the story "A translucent young man rushed about on the bed ...".

In 1941, for the first time since 1937, two children's books featuring Kharms were published.

The last of the surviving works of Kharms was the story "Rehabilitation", written in June 1941.

August 23, 1941 Kharms was arrested and charged with anti-Soviet activities. In mid-December, he was transferred to the psychiatric department of the prison hospital at Kresty.

On February 2, 1942, Daniil Kharms died in prison in besieged Leningrad from exhaustion. His name was deleted from Soviet literature.

In 1960, Kharms' sister Elizaveta Gritsyna turned to the USSR Prosecutor General with a request to reconsider her brother's case. On July 25, 1960, Kharms was found not guilty by a decision of the Leningrad prosecutor's office, his case was closed due to lack of corpus delicti, and he himself was rehabilitated.

A collection of his children's poems "Game" (1962) was published in the USSR. Since 1978, his collected works have been published in Germany. By the mid-1990s, Kharms had taken the place of one of the main representatives of Russian fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, opposed to Soviet literature.

The first complete three-volume collection of works by Daniil Kharms was published in Russia in the 2010s.

Daniil Kharms was married twice. The first wife, Esther Rusakova, the daughter of a former political emigrant, after a divorce from the writer in 1937, was arrested with her family, sentenced to five years in the camps, and soon died in Magadan.

The second wife of Kharms, Marina Malich, came from the Golitsyn family, after the death of her husband, she was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Pyatigorsk, from where she was driven away by the Germans for forced labor in Germany. She managed to get to France, later Marina emigrated to Venezuela. According to her memoirs, literary critic Vladimir Glotser wrote the book "Marina Durnovo: My husband Daniil Kharms".

The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources

By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupies the place of one of the main representatives of Russian art literature of the 1920s and 1930s, in fact opposed to Soviet literature.

Born December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father, when he was a naval officer, was brought to trial in 1883 for complicity in the Narodnaya Volya terror, spent four years in solitary confinement and more than ten years in hard labor, where, apparently, he experienced a religious conversion: along with memoirs Eight years on Sakhalin ( 1901) and Shlisselburg Fortress (1907), he published mystical treatises Between the World and the Monastery (1903), Secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven (1910) and others. Kharms's mother, a noblewoman, was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg in the 1900s. Kharms studied at the St. Petersburg privileged German school (Petershule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, from where he was expelled a year later for "weak attendance" and "inactivity in public works." Since then, he devoted himself entirely to writing and lived exclusively by literary earnings. The versatile self-education accompanying writing, with a special focus on philosophy and psychology, as his diary testifies, proceeded extremely intensively.

Initially, he felt the “power of poetry” in himself and chose poetry as his career, the concept of which was determined by him under the influence of the poet A.V. Tufanov (1877–1941), admirer and successor of V.V. ) and the founder (in March 1925) of the Order of Zaumnikov, the core of which included Kharms, who took the title “Look Zaumi.” Through Tufanov, he became close to A. Vvedensky, a student of the more orthodox poet “Khlebnikov” and admirer A. Kruchenykh I.G. .Terentiev (1892–1937), the creator of a number of agitation plays, including the “actualizing” stage adaptation of the Inspector General, parodied in the Twelve Chairs by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. Harms had a strong friendship with Vvedensky, who, sometimes without any particular reason, took on the role of Harms' mentor. However, the focus of their work, which is related in terms of literary searches, is fundamentally different from beginning to end: Vvedensky develops and maintains a didactic orientation, whereas Kharms is dominated by a game one. This is evidenced by his first well-known poetic texts: Kika with Koka, Vanka Vstanka, the grooms and the poem Mikhaila invented the earth.

Vvedensky provided Kharms with a new circle of constant communication, introducing him to his friends L. Lipavsky and Y. Druskin, graduates of the philosophical department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, who refused to renounce their teacher, the prominent Russian philosopher N.O. to develop his ideas of self-value of the individual and intuitive knowledge. Their views undoubtedly influenced Kharms's worldview, for more than 15 years they were the first listeners and connoisseurs of Kharms, during the blockade Druskin miraculously saved his compositions.

Back in 1922, Vvedensky, Lipavsky and Druskin founded a tripartite alliance and began to call themselves "plane trees"; in 1925 they were joined by Kharms, who from “gazing zaumi” became “plane-gazer” and quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his newly invented pseudonym, which became the plural of the English word “harm” - “misfortune”. Subsequently, he signed his works for children in other ways (Charms, Shardam, etc.), but he never used his own surname. The pseudonym was also fixed in the introductory questionnaire of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where Kharms was accepted in March 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (The case on the railway and the Poem of Pyotr Yashkin, a communist) managed to be printed in small-circulation collections of the Union. In addition to them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work of Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem Mary comes out, having bowed (Sat. Poetry Day, 1965).

As a member of the literary association, Kharms got the opportunity to read his poems, but he took advantage of it only once, in October 1926 - other attempts were in vain. The playful beginning of his poems stimulated their dramatization and stage performance: in 1926, together with Vvedensky, he prepared a synthetic performance of the avant-garde theater "Radix" My mother is all in hours, but things did not go beyond rehearsals. Kharms met K. Malevich, and the head of Suprematism presented him with his book God will not throw off with the inscription "Go and stop progress." Kharms read his poem On the Death of Kazimir Malevich at a memorial service for the artist in 1936. Kharms' gravitation towards the dramatic form was expressed in the dialogization of many poems (Temptation, Paw, Revenge, etc.), as well as in the creation of the Comedy of the City of Petersburg and the first predominantly prose work - a play by Elizaveta Bam, presented on January 24, 1928 at the only evening of the "Association of Real Art" (OBERIU), which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included N. Zabolotsky, K. Vaginov and I. Bakhterev, and to which N. Oleinikov joined - with him Kharms developed a special intimacy. The association was unstable, lasted less than three years (1927-1930), and Kharms' active participation in it was rather external, not affecting his creative principles in any way. The characterization given to him by Zabolotsky, the compiler of the OBERIU manifesto, is vague: "a poet and playwright whose attention is focused not on a static figure, but on the collision of a number of objects, on their relationships."

At the end of 1927, Oleinikov and B. Zhitkov organized the "Association of Writers of Children's Literature" and invited Kharms to join it; from 1928 to 1941 he constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket" and "October", during which time he published about 20 children's books. These works are a natural offshoot of Kharms' work and give a kind of outlet for his playing element, but, as his diaries and letters testify, they were written exclusively for earnings (more than meager since the mid-1930s) and the author did not attach much importance to them. They were published through the efforts of S.Ya. Marshak, the attitude of leading criticism towards them, starting with an article in Pravda (1929) Against hack work in children's literature, was unequivocal. This is probably why it was necessary to constantly vary and change the pseudonym.

His unpublished works were regarded by the Smena newspaper in April 1930 as "poetry of a class enemy", the article became a harbinger of Kharms's arrest at the end of 1931, the qualification of his literary pursuits as "subversive work" and "counter-revolutionary activity" and exile to Kursk. In 1932 he managed to return to Leningrad. The nature of his work is changing: poetry fades into the background and less and less poetry is written (the last completed poems date back to the beginning of 1938), while prose works (with the exception of the story of the Old Woman, creations of a small genre) multiply and cycle (Cases, Scenes, etc.). ). In place of the lyrical hero - an entertainer, a ringleader, a visionary and a miracle worker - a deliberately naive narrator-observer appears, impartial to the point of cynicism. Fiction and everyday grotesque reveal the cruel and delusional absurdity of "unattractive reality" (from diaries), and the effect of terrifying authenticity is created due to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, and speech mimics. In unison with diary entries (“the days of my death have come”, etc.), the last stories (Knights, Fall, Interference, Rehabilitation) are imbued with a feeling of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of crazy arbitrariness, cruelty and vulgarity.

In August 1941 Harms was arrested for "defeatist remarks".

Kharms' writings, even printed ones, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, The Game (1962), was published. After that, for about 20 years, they tried to assign him the appearance of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer in the children's part, which was completely inconsistent with his "adult" writings. Since 1978, his collected works have been published in Germany, prepared on the basis of saved manuscripts by M. Meilakh and V. Erl. By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupies the place of one of the main representatives of Russian art literature of the 1920s and 1930s, in fact opposed to Soviet literature.

At the time of the publication in 1995 of the first collection of works by Daniil Ivanovich Kharms in Russia, this poet remained a mysterious character. Its role in Russian literature is still not clear. Kharms himself formulated his creative credo as follows - "the ingeniously correctly found minor deviation that creates true art."

Yuvachev - this was the name of Daniil Ivanovich at birth. On December 17 (30 - according to the new style) December 1905, he was born in St. Petersburg. From about 1924, he calls himself Kharms. For all the time there were several dozen pseudonyms - Khharms, Haarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling and others. But in the end, it was Kharms that was most often used. He apparently came from the French "charm" - "charm, charm" and from the English "harm" - "harm". Father - Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev (1860-1940) was a deeply Orthodox man and published a number of religious works. He never recognized his son's poetic activity, because it was very different from his ideas about poetry. But he had an important influence on the moral and religious formation of Kharms. Little is known about her mother, Nadezhda Ivanovna Kolyubakina, who was a teacher.

Daniil Ivanovich studied at the Main German School of St. Peter (Petershule). There he thoroughly learned German and English. But the writer finished his studies at another school, in Tsarskoye Selo, where his maternal aunt, Natalya Ivanovna Kolyubakina, was the director. From 1924 to 1925 Yuvachev studied at the Leningrad Electrotechnical School. But in the end, he did not receive either higher or secondary specialized education. And, based on the lists of books studied in his diary, he was very fond of reading and self-education.

Harms began to actively engage in literary activities in 1925, starting to communicate with a small team of Leningrad poets, the first of whom was Alexander Tufanov, an innovative poet. This association was called the "Order of the wise men." Participants gave performances in different places with the reading of their own and other people's poems. Around 1926, Kharms was accepted into the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets, and expelled three years later for non-payment of dues. In addition, in 1926-27. two of his poems are published in the collections of the Union of Poets. At the same time, Daniil Ivanovich feels the desire to gather all the so-called "left" writers and innovators in one organization.

In 1927, Kharms, together with A. Vvedensky, N. Zabolotsky and I. Bakhterev, formed a literary group - the Association of Real Art - OBERIU. And in 1928, the journal Posters of the House of Printing published the well-known declaration of OBERIU. In it, the group is positioned as a "new detachment of leftist revolutionary art" and poets of a new worldview and a new poetic language. That is what they were. Brief descriptions of each member of the association are also written there. In the same 1928, in the Leningrad House of Printing, the Oberiuts organized an extensive theatrical evening “Three Left Hours”. In the first hour - the reading of poems, in the second - Kharms' play "Elizabeth Bam", and in the third - a demonstration of the film "Meat Grinder" by Razumovsky and K. Mints. The performance was a great success, and ended in the morning. But in the afternoon in Krasnaya Gazeta, oddly enough, an extremely negative article appeared, in which Kharms's play was criticized and called chaotic and incomprehensible. After such a review, the Oberiuts performed only short programs, as before. The final performance of the association was in the dormitory of students of Leningrad State University. It also aroused indignation, and was characterized in an article in the Smena newspaper as "poetry of alien people and class enemies." The end date of the OBERIU is April 9, 1930.

In 1928-1931. Kharms composed poems, stories and invented charades for children's magazines. At the same time, nine illustrated books for children were published. In part, that article in Smena was one of the pretexts for the arrest of Kharms and Vvedensky at the end of 1931. The main reason was the work for the publishing house "Children's Literature", the accusation of anti-Soviet writing. They were exiled to Kursk, but in the autumn of 1932 the original order (three years of penal camps) was relaxed, and the poets returned to Leningrad. Since that time, Kharms writes fewer poems and scenes of everyday violence and the abomination of life are drawn in his work.

From March 1928 to 1932, Kharms was married to Esther Alexandrovna Rusakova (Ioselevich), the daughter of emigrants from Taganrog, who was born in Marseille and lived there for 13 years. They met around 1923-24. He mentioned a lot about her and their difficult relationship in his diaries and devoted many works to her. During the years of close communication between Kharms and Esther, a personal biographical subtext appears in his writings. An important theme of Kharms' lyrics is connected with it - the motif of the window. Translated into Russian, Esther is a star. For him, she is not just a loved one, but also something else that was present in all thoughts and deeds. He wrote: "The whole world is a window - Esther."

Marina Vladimirovna Malich became Kharms' second wife in 1934 and was present with him until his arrest in 1941. The writer gave her the nickname Fefulya and dedicated three songs (about Fefulya). Marina is also dedicated to a large cycle of "Cases" - thirty stories and skits. She also saved most of the Kharms archive from the house on Mayakovskaya after the bombing and handed it over to Ya. S. Druskin, his fellow writer and philosopher.

At the end of the 30s, Kharms published the famous poem "A man came out of the house ...". After that, it was not published for about a year. Then the second major creation appears - the story "The Old Woman". This work is simultaneously philosophical, biographical and fantastic. Further, Kharms composes mostly only prose. In 1940-41, his creations become more and more gloomy, which is dictated by the events of those times, a hungry existence and a sense of hopelessness.

In August 1941, Kharms was arrested for what he called "defeatist" sayings and slander. And on February 2, 1942, during the blockade of Leningrad, he dies in a prison psychiatric hospital. According to some sources, Kharms pretended to have a mental disorder in order to evade execution.

Kharms was characterized by the vision of the world as an organic whole and the denial of unshakable literary authorities. In his work, he enriched and sharpened the meaning of objects and words. Kharms wanted to achieve a state of superconsciousness, where "I" through "it" will give way to "we", and the individuality of the poet will expand to cosmic limits, without losing its concreteness and originality. To see the world as a whole, using the method of extended viewing - that was his goal. The poet had to turn into an all-encompassing being. His texts had no clear boundaries. Kharms deliberately did not follow spelling and punctuation rules, and this was dictated by his perception of the world and poetry. The task of the poet was the transformation of this world. He wanted to cover the whole existence at one moment, getting rid of commas. So he saw the world as constantly renewing, every moment was perceived as an independent unit containing the entire universe. Kharms transformed words by changing one or more letters without completely destroying the sound shell of the word. He attached great importance to the evoking of certain sensations of movement.

The works of Daniil Kharms will impress the interested and sensitive reader. Unusual play on words and gravitas lead to a completely special state. You can call him the genius of the absurd.

Daniil Kharms (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev) was born on December 30 (old style - 17) December 1905. His father, Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev, was a man of exceptional destiny. For participation in the Narodnaya Volya terror, he (then a naval officer) was tried in 1883 and spent four years in solitary confinement, and then more than ten years in hard labor. Kharms' mother was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg.
Kharms studied at the St. Petersburg German School (Petershule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In 1924, he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, from where he was expelled a year later for "poor attendance" and "inactivity in public works." Thus, the writer could not receive either higher or secondary specialized education. But he was intensively engaged in self-education, he was especially fond of philosophy and psychology. Lived exclusively literary earnings. Since 1924, he begins to call himself Kharms. This was the main of his many pseudonyms; originating, perhaps, from the French “charm” (charm, charm), and from the English “harm” (harm, attack); he quite accurately reflected the essence of the writer's attitude to life and work: Kharms was able to travesty the most serious things and find very sad moments in the most seemingly ridiculous. The same ambivalence was also characteristic of his personality: an orientation towards the game, towards a merry prank, combined with sometimes painful suspiciousness, with the certainty that he brings misfortune to those he loves.
In 1925 Harms met the young Esther Rusakova and soon married her. The romance and marriage were difficult and painful for both parties - until the divorce in 1932. However, all his life he will remember Esther and compare with her all the women with whom fate will bring him.
In 1925, Kharms joined a small group of Leningrad poets, headed by Alexander Tufanov, who called themselves "zaumniks". Here an acquaintance and friendship with Alexander Vvedensky takes place. In 1926, together with the young philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin, they formed the "Planar" association. Around the same time, Kharms and Vvedensky were admitted to the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets. In the collections of the Union, they publish two of their poems, which remain the only "adult" works that they are destined to see printed. The main form of activity of the "plane trees" is performances with the reading of their poems in clubs, universities, literary circles; they usually ended in scandals.
Harms participates in various left-wing associations, initiates their creation. In 1927, the Association of Real Art (OBERIU) appeared, which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included Nikolai Zabolotsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Igor Bakhterev, Nikolai Oleinikov, who became a close friend of Kharms, also joined them.
The only evening of OBERIU on January 24, 1928 became a kind of benefit performance for Kharms: in the first part he read poetry, and in the second part his play “Elizaveta Bam” was staged (it in many ways anticipates the opening of the European theater of the absurd). Sharply negative reviews in the press determined the impossibility of such evenings, now the Oberiuts could only perform with small programs. Finally, one of their performances in the dormitory of the Leningrad State University caused new accusations of counterrevolutionaryism. In 1930, OBERIU ceased to exist, and at the end of 1931 Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested. The verdict, however, was relatively mild - exile to Kursk, and the efforts of friends led to the fact that already in the autumn of 1932 the poets were able to return to Leningrad.
At the end of 1927, Oleinikov and Boris Zhitkov organized the "Association of Writers of Children's Literature" and invited Kharms to join it. From 1928 to 1941, he constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket", "October", he published about 20 children's books. Poems and prose for children provide a kind of outlet for his playful element, but they were written solely for making money and the author did not attach much importance to them. The attitude of official party criticism towards them was unambiguously negative.
After the exile, there could no longer be any talk of any publications or speeches. Moreover, it was necessary to hide their creativity from outsiders. Therefore, the communication of the former Oberiuts and people close to them now took place in apartments. Kharms, Vvedensky, Lipavsky, Druskin, Zabolotsky, Oleinikov, talked on literary, philosophical and other topics. The activities of this circle continued for several years. But in 1936 he married a Kharkov woman and Vvedensky went to her, in 1937 Oleinikov was arrested and soon shot.
"Adult" works of Kharms are now written exclusively "on the table." Poetry is replaced by prose, the story becomes the leading prose genre. In the 30s. there is a desire for a large form. The cycle “Cases” can be considered its first example - thirty short stories and sketches that Kharms arranged in a certain order, copied into a separate notebook and dedicated to his second wife Marina Malich (whom he married in 1935). In 1939, the second big thing appeared - the story "The Old Woman". There are about a dozen stories written in 1940-1941.
By the end of the 1930s, the ring around Kharms was shrinking. Fewer opportunities to publish in children's magazines. The result was a very real famine. The tragedy of the writer's works during this period intensifies to a feeling of complete hopelessness, complete meaninglessness of existence. Kharms's humor is also undergoing a similar evolution: from light, slightly ironic to black.
The beginning of the war and the first bombardments of Leningrad strengthened Kharms' sense of his own impending doom. In August 1941 he was arrested for "defeatist remarks". For a long time, no one knew anything about his future fate, only in February 1942, Marina Malich was informed of the death of her husband. Opinions about his last days are mixed. Some believe that Kharms, who was threatened with execution, feigned a mental disorder and was sent to a prison psychiatric hospital, where he died in the first Leningrad winter of the siege. There is also information that Kharms was indeed diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly before his arrest, so he was placed in a hospital for compulsory treatment. It is not known exactly where he died - in Leningrad or Novosibirsk. Date of death - February 2, 1942
Kharms' manuscripts were preserved by his friend Iosif Druskin; he took them in the winter of 1942 from the empty room of the writer. I did not part with this suitcase either during the evacuation or upon returning to Leningrad, for about twenty years I did not touch its contents, retaining hope for a miracle - the return of the owner. And only when there was no hope, he began to sort through the papers of his deceased friend.
Daniil Kharms has verses that many call prophetic:

A man came out of the house
With rope and bag
And on a long journey, and on a long journey
Went on foot.
He walked and kept looking ahead,
And looked ahead
Didn't sleep, didn't drink
Didn't sleep, didn't drink
Didn't sleep, didn't drink, didn't eat.
And then one morning
He entered the dark forest
And from that time, and from that time,
And since then he has disappeared...
And if somewhere
You have to meet
Then quickly, then quickly
Tell us quickly.

Twenty-five years after his death, Kharms was appreciated by the general reader. His second birth began, which continues today.

..............................................
Copyright: Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms was born in St. Petersburg on December 30, 1905. His father was Ivan Yuvachev, a populist revolutionary who survived exile on Sakhalin, was familiar with Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and other famous Russian writers of his time.

early years

Thanks to his father, a writer, Daniel early became interested in literature. He studied at several schools, including Petrishula, the oldest school in St. Petersburg. In 1925, the young man joined the All-Russian Union of Poets. Even before that, he began to use the pseudonym Kharms, with which he became widely known. The greatest influence on his work at that time was provided by Velimir Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, Alexei Kruchenykh.

The novice writer Daniil Kharms joined a variety of literary circles, which flourished just in the 1920s. One of them was the community of "plane trees" - young philosophers and writers of Leningrad. It also included Leonid Lipavsky, Alexander Vvedensky and Yakov Druskin.

The main occupation of "Pinari" were performances with the reading of their own poems. Sometimes dances were arranged at such meetings, especially the then extremely popular foxtrot. The Union of Poets, the location of the regiments where his friends served - these are just some of the places where Daniil Kharms himself performed. A biography for children can do without these facts, however, for the future children's writer, the events of that period of life were extremely important for the formation of his creative style. Gradually, public recitations of avant-garde poetry became more and more difficult. Every year the Soviet state became more and more picky about what the intelligentsia offered to society.

OBERIU

Gradually, Daniil Kharms, whose biography at that time was most connected with life inside the Leningrad bohemia, gathered around him a circle of devoted supporters. This group was called either the "Left Flank" or the "Academy of the Left Classics". In 1927, it was renamed the Association of Real Art - OBERIU. The group broke up in the early 1930s. The greatest success of her activity can be considered "Three Left Hours" - a creative evening at which the premiere of Kharms's play "Elizaveta Bam" took place.

According to the creator's idea, OBERIU was supposed to unite all the forces of the leftist art of Leningrad. Therefore, initially the group was divided into five sections: literary, visual, musical, theatrical and cinematographic. Daniil Ivanovich Kharms had a hand in all this. A biography for children published in the USSR, of course, did not mention these, at times, radical experiments of the writer.

Collaboration with children's magazines

What else was young Daniil Kharms famous for? The biography of the writer is often associated with the mass reader with his works in the genre of children's literature. Harms began to write for children at the instigation of Samuil Marshak, Boris Zhitkov and Nikolai Oleinikov. In the 1930s he worked in the children's magazines "Chizh", "Hedgehog" and "Cricket". Daniil Kharms left many stories and puzzles in them. Biography (2nd grade presentation) cannot do without mentioning this part of his work.

Children's literature for a long time remained almost the only permanent income of the author. It is interesting that even innocent works for the smallest audience were banned by censorship for some time. This happened, for example, with the "Naughty Book" - a collection of stories and poems. She was on the censorship lists in 1951-1961.

Daniil Kharms, whose biography is also the biography of a translator, translated some children's works. Thanks to him, Wilhelm Bush and his book of humorous poems Plikh and Plyukh were read in the USSR. The writer also published works composed in collaboration with colleagues in the creative workshop. So in 1937, "Stories in Pictures" came out. The illustrations were drawn by Nikolai Radlov, while the text itself was written by Nina Gernet, Natalya Dilaktorskaya and Daniil Kharms. The biography of the author for a long time was known mainly from this book.

Personal life

The first time the writer married in 1928. Esther Rusakova became his wife. Most of the works written by Kharms in the second half of the 20s - early 30s were dedicated to this girl. The couple divorced in 1932. Rusakova was later repressed.

Then Harms lived short novels. Such was the relationship with the artist Alisa Poret. The second time the writer married in 1934 - this time to Marina Malich. The couple were together until the disastrous arrest of Kharms in 1941.

Link to Kursk

Kharms was first arrested in 1931. Then, allegedly, an "anti-Soviet group of writers" was uncovered, to which 26-year-old Yuvachev was included. At first he was sentenced to three years in the camps. Then the punishment for the convict was changed to exile in Kursk.

Kharms' comrade Alexander Vvedensky was also there. Besides him, the writer communicated only with the artists Erbstein, Safonova and Gershov. This company was much smaller than the one with which the exile maintained contact in Leningrad. And yet, the writer was lucky. He himself accepted the news of his deportation to Kursk instead of prison with joy, and treated it only as a creative business trip.

In exile, the main problem was the lack of money and problems with housing. Daniil Kharms experienced all this with great difficulty. The biography, briefly known from letters of that time, says that the only consolation for the convict was these same letters from friends and relatives. Kharms' main correspondents were his sister, father, aunt, Boris Zhitkov and Tamara Meyer. In Kursk, the writer had his first health problems. They were caused by poor nutrition and a lack of good doctors. But even in provincial outpatient clinics, the writer was given disappointing diagnoses - pleurisy and nervous breakdown.

Changes in style

In the autumn of 1932 the writer returned to Leningrad. After the first trial, Kharms' life changed a lot. His group OBERIU was under a virtual ban - its active public activities ceased. Decreased circulation of Yuvachev's children's books. He began to live in poverty - there was a clear lack of money. In this regard, the entire creative style of the author has changed.

Before the case against the “anti-Soviet group”, the writer Daniil Kharms, whose biography in this sense repeated the fate of many other colleagues, paid much attention to utopian projects and themes. After 1932, he gradually abandoned the previous concept. In addition, the writer pays more and more attention to prose and less and less to poetry.

Problems with book publishing

The inability to publish his adult works - that's what Daniil Kharms suffered the most from. Biography, poems and stories of the author in the modern sense are an important part of Russian culture of the XX century. However, during his lifetime, Kharms did not have such an honorary status at all. Desperation led him to the fact that he began to build fantastic plans for the publication of the samizdat magazine Tapir. This plan never came to fruition.

In 1933 Harms was ill with paratyphoid. Even after his recovery, he was in a creative crisis. For example, in the first half of 1933, the writer completed only a dozen poems and two miniatures, which later became part of the Cases cycle. But it was these sketches, including “The Mathematician and Andrei Semenovich,” that became the new starting point, from which Harms Daniil Ivanovich later repelled. The biography of the writer was like an attraction - after a long period of stagnation, he finally began to work fruitfully with a new form.

Life in Leningrad

While in Leningrad, Harms sometimes spent whole weeks with his aunt in Tsarskoye Selo. Such was the summer of 1933, when he became interested in chess problems and plunged headlong into Indian themes. It is interesting that the writer was engaged in hatha yoga back in the 20s.

1933 - 1934 were a period of numerous meetings of plane trees on Gatchinskaya street in the house of Leonid Lipavsky. This philosopher and writer remained Kharms' best friend for a long time. At the same time, a German language specialist Dmitry Mikhailov joined their circle. His hobbies were close to Kharms, since he himself passionately loved everything connected with Germany.

New events

At this time, the writer earned mainly by his performances in Leningrad schools. He also traveled to pioneer camps. He knew how to get along with children, who each time remained delighted with the visits of a famous children's writer. This period of relative financial prosperity was interrupted in 1935. Then Malevich died, with whom Kharms had long-standing warm creative and human relations. The writer spoke with his poem at a civil memorial service for the artist.

In the summer of 1935, Daniil Ivanovich Kharms, whose biography was still firmly connected with children's magazines, wrote the play "Circus Shardam". Its premiere took place in October at the Shaporina Marionette Theatre. In the future, financial problems pestered Kharms more and more often. He repeatedly applied to the Literary Fund for loans.

The heyday of creativity

In the 1930s Harms wrote his main works. These were “Cases” (a cycle of stories), “The Old Woman” (a story) and many stories within the framework of small prose. The author failed to publish them. During his lifetime, Harms was, first of all, known precisely as a writer in the genre of children's literature. His "underground" work became known much later.

It is believed that in 1936 a new type of Kharms prose appeared. Vivid examples of such works were "The Fate of the Professor's Wife", "Cashier", "Father and Daughter". These stories were mostly devoted to the theme of death. It is also indicative that in that year Kharms wrote only two poems “The Dream of Two Black Ladies” and “Variations”.

At the end of 1936, the Soviet press began to prepare for the centenary of Pushkin's death. "Our everything" Kharms dedicated two works. The first is the story "Pushkin is for children", the second is an anonymous essay about Pushkin, published in Chizh.

Second arrest and death

In 1937, Kharms' children's publishing house was destroyed. Many of his friends and comrades were repressed (Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Oleinikov, Tamara Gabbe, etc.). Kharms himself was arrested for the second time in August 1941 - in the third month of the war with Germany. He was accused of spreading defeatist sentiments.

At the height of the famine during the blockade of the city, the writer was sent to a psychiatric hospital located in the famous "Crosses". There he died on February 2, 1942. Kharms was rehabilitated only 18 years later.

The writer's archive was saved by the writer Yakov Druskin. The author's manuscripts in a suitcase were taken out of the author's house, which was badly damaged by the bombing. The publication of these "adult" works began in the 1960s. However, even during the thaw, their circulation remained low. Kharms' legacy was much more popular in samizdat. In 1974, his selected writings were published in the United States. The most complete four-volume edition appeared in Bremen in the 1980s. In the USSR, the cupping of Kharms' works ceased only during perestroika. It was then that domestic readers for the first time were able to fully get acquainted with the work of the poet and prose writer.